Reframe: Sculpture at the Old Schwamb Mill

ReFrame brings together the work of Adria Arch, Olivia Baldwin, Tory Fair, Anna Kristina Göransson, and Kate Holcomb Hale, five artists with deep ties to Arlington whose practices share a restless relationship with sculptural convention. Shown in the Mill’s historic upper rooms, close to the spaces where frames were crafted by hand, the work spills across walls and floors, refusing the categories that would hold it still.
Each artist will display large-scale pieces alongside smaller works for sale, with proceeds supporting The Old Schwamb Mill.

The exhibition runs September 12 – November 14, 2026, with an opening reception on Saturday, September 26, 2–3:30 pm, a panel discussion on Saturday, October 24, 2–3 pm, and a closing reception on Saturday, November 14.

The historic Old Schwamb Mill in Arlington, Massachusetts, has been making frames since 1864. Its oval frames, among the finest ever produced in America, once defined the boundaries of painted worlds. This fall, five sculptors arrive at this storied building to ask what happens when the frame gives way.

Anna Kristina Göransson’s Seeping Memories speaks to the way memories work their way into our lives, growing, changing, branching into every corner of experience. The oval frame nods to the Mill’s own manufacturing legacy and to the framed family photographs that hang in homes everywhere.

The sunflowers in Tory Fair’s Rage Flowers were harvested from community gardens. They are cast in silicone mixed with dirt, the fragile beauty of a bloom transformed into something with both glamour and grit.

Olivia Baldwin makes abstract, two- and three-dimensional work propelled by color and movement, built from leather, clay, wire, and found and inherited materials.

Adria Arch’s work recalls the framing specialty of The Old Schwamb Mill, using the circle and oval as a recurring reference point. Radiating spokes, dangling parts, and clashing color pull the form off the wall and into motion.

Kate Holcomb Hale’s interdisciplinary practice uses sculpture, painting, and craft to call attention to objects and architecture that perform care, collapsing ladders, knotted handrails, resting columns. Conceived after losing her mother, father, and brother in close succession, this work considers who carries the weight when systems of care fail.